Saturday, August 6, 2011

Military personnel aboard a plane named Necessary Evil took these photographs moments after the atomic bomb from hell was unleashed first on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and three days later on the city of Nagasaki. President Harry S. Truman issued an executive ordered that obliterated 166,000 civilians in the first blast and approximately 80,000 in the second. Those are conservative estimates. More than 1/2 of the casualties occurred on the first day of the attacks. Japan surrendered six days later and World War II ended.

The costs of human life from combat on both sides of the six-year conflict since it began was enormous for the United States and most of the world's nations, resulting in 70 million fatalities and untold stories of devastation worldwide. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki..... these are the images that remain within our consciousness sixty-six years later. The costs? Incalculable. How can you measure the cost of this? Necessary evil? This is the only photo I could stand to place on my blog. We all know the horrific effects on the Japanese people, but sometimes, you just need to look again.

I commemorate these events, not to gloat or to extoll the virtues of my nation, but to remind myself that there is an awful price to be paid in blood and sacrifice when we step forward and defend our right to be who we are and live in freedom. If the choice is to pick up the sword and go forth to war, then let it be the last option after all other options are earnestly exhausted.